We did not expect this from Paxo
IT IS my birthday. I’m 55 since you ask, though I don’t look a day over 54. I know, I know, there’s nothing special about me but I thought I might spell out how 55 feels.
Here goes… exactly the same as 14 feels except when some meddlesome curmudgeon chooses to remind you how flipping antique you are.
I want everything I wanted as a callow teenager. I want excitement, adventure, to be kissed in the rain, to live happily ever after. I still love cheap earrings, cheap sweets and snogging in the back row of the local flea-pit.
I may be older but somehow don’t seem to have grown one iota wiser. Even in the tropical sauna of a hot flush I still imagine myself frisky and frolicsome.
On the outside I’m a proud grandma, seasoned BBC broadcaster and responsible council tax payer. Inside? Well that would be telling. STYLISH: Jackie Collins in trademark leopard print and, inset, some of her valuable jewellery
WHO would be 64-year-old Elizabeth Clough? She is the woman who stood by her partner Jeremy Paxman’s side ever since the two collided at the BBC. She is the mother of his three children, Jessica, 26, and 19-year-old twins Jack and Victoria.
Elizabeth is both bright and beautiful. Tall, leggy, blonde and elegant, as one of the first female pupils at all-boys Marlborough College she sent teenage hormones into a maelstrom and won the heart of the head boy.
She soared academically at Somerville College, Oxford, and segued straight into a series of jobs at the BBC. She is the kind of woman who turns heads, wins hearts and – you might think – after 35 years as his other half, has earned the right at The Beatles’ fabled age of 64 to sail contentedly into the sunset, respected and admired, in the bosom of her family with Paxman, the man of her life, by her side.
Instead, Elizabeth finds herself – as so many charming and devoted women have before her – deserted, humiliated and facing an uncertain future as – after she and her partner split – he wafts off with researcher Jillian Taylor, 37.
An original thinker and trailblazer, she must be smarting at the cliché her existence has become. To be traded in for a younger model by a partner desperate to cling to his fading youth is so excruciatingly bog standard.
Elizabeth must surely have thought her consort, the pugilistic television warrior known as Paxo, would have the wit and wisdom to resist treading that well-worn path. She must have hoped his superior intelligence would have elevated his urges far above those of the common man. Boy, was she wrong.
In the mid 1990s I was a guest on Newsnight. The TV talk show was still regarded with suspicion as an alien import from the US and as the host of the Vanessa Show I had been summoned to defend it. Nervous, I sat waiting for the red light to proclaim the programme was being broadcast live.
With seconds to go Paxman drawled: “Drat it. Moths have been at my trousers. Holes everywhere and a distinct draught blowing around the testicular area. Good evening and welcome to Newsnight.”
READER, I was shocked and tickled by the man’s composure and boundless confidence. At that moment I realised why women queued up to fawn over him and fall swooning at his feet. He was fearless, funny, in command of all he surveyed and he had just mentioned his unmentionables to me.
What a shame that Paxo – so used to female adulation – could not have coasted till his dotage on the tide of approbation without feeling the need to move on to a younger woman. Should his knowledge of the arts not have demonstrated that loyalty, family history and compassion top novelty every time?